Last week I noticed a new email footer from a buddy who works for a company based in Philadelphia that sells pipe fittings. I went to their site and the same disclaimer is on several of its pages.
Material quoted and or sold by Pennsylvania Machine Works, Inc is not to be shipped or transshipped into the following countries: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan or Syria.
Basically his company is saying “If our stuff winds up in Kim Jong Il’s hands, it wasn’t us.” I commented about the disclaimer and he said that a competitor in Houston almost lost their company on a 3rd or 4th transaction to one of those countries. I guess there’s a chance a company could try to “launder” a transaction to one of those countries by having themselves removed from the first transaction by several additional “transaction” trails. Since I’m not an expert in selling industrial items to countries that are banned by the U.S. Government, I’m not sure what would be considered vital to a rogue country and thus making it a treasonous transaction. Perhaps pipe fittings could be used in a nuclear facility or something?
It reminds me of an issue I encountered last year in testing an enhancement of Google Checkout into one of our applications. For some reason our test transactions to Google Checkout kept on failing even though we had everything setup properly according to their documentation. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth by our development crew, we found the reason why on a Google users forum. It turns out some new code we got from our 3rd party software developer was sending every country in our database to Google for each transaction. The problem is when you send transaction info to Google that includes embargoed countries like Cuba, Iran and Syria, they have a filter to weed out shipping options to any “rogue” countries like those.
The moral of the story is if you’re purchasing or selling items that you need to send to one of our Axis of Evil zones, use a money order. And don't use your real name.